"It was like a leopard, with feet like the feet of a bear, and had a mouth like a lion."
It is the darkest part of the night, just before the hour chimes the beginnings of a new day, when Isra finds herself at the entrance of the maze. For hours she had stood on a hill watching the horses of her city walk into the dark yawning mouth of the monster with laughter dancing bright as fireflies on their lips.
For hours her rage had grown, and grown, and grown. It grew seven heads and it roared.
Every drop of her magic, every terrible mile of it it that runs deeper than the sea, is alive in her blood. It's all sharp edges and magma. There are lions running through her bones, and dragons curling their wings across her sides. Each monster, each wicked thing in the world, is moving through her thoughts in black ink so dark it eats every other color. And by the time she looks into the endless maw of the maze she is every monster this universe has ever borne.
Tonight she doesn't have her moon-blessed bow. Her dragon is somewhere else in the city playing with her children on the edges of the markets. Eik too, perhaps, is somewhere else. She is alone in the darkness where the moon has long since turned to nothing more than a distant cold glow behind the fog of the coming more.
She is alone and all she can think is, yes.
It comes out like a roar. Like a whip-lash of magic that makes all the grass around her turn to barbed-wire and quicksand. Yes, her magic roars in it's cage of sea-stained skin. All the wire and sand turns to obsidian grass that's cold and hard and unforgiving. She steps closer to the maze. Shadows gather between the spirals of her horn and in the hollows below her eyes. The shadows devour every blue-green scale on her skin and every part of her eyes that have ever known how to look soft.
Another steps makes her hard, and sharp, and dark enough to be ore.
The first step she takes into the mouth of the maze, to the place where the maze sings of trickery, and where anyone else standing on the hill might not be able to tell her apart from the corn---
The first step she takes into the maze is the last breath the wind makes through the cornstalks.
Because as soon as her hoof hits where the obsidian grass ends every stalk of corn turns into a dragon-high flower. Each stem is a jagged stretch of steel and each leaf is diamond clear and barbed with rust. Each blossom is sun-golden and dotted with black stains. If there was moonlight to see by each spot of black on the gold would look like an beetle feasting on the petal.
But there is no moonlight and so every petal, every single one, looks like an ode to all the blood her flesh (and her magic) remembers.
And still her magic roar and drags the teeth of all its seven heads across the dirt.
@any
